Hardcover, 274 pages
Published Dec. 17, 2019 by Rverhead Books.
With Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Man Booker International Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk returns with a subversive, entertaining noir novel. In a remote Polish village, Janina Duszejko, an eccentric woman in her sixties, recounts the events surrounding the disappearance of her two dogs. She is reclusive, preferring the company of animals to people; she’s unconventional, believing in the stars; and she is fond of the poetry of William Blake, from whose work the title of the book is taken. When members of a local hunting club are found murdered, Duszejko becomes involved in the investigation. By no means a conventional crime story, this existential thriller by ‘one of Europe’s major humanist writers’ (Guardian) offers thought-provoking ideas on our perceptions of madness, injustice against marginalized people, animal rights, the hypocrisy of traditional religion, belief in predestination – and caused a genuine political uproar in Tokarczuk’s native Poland.
Neither the plot nor the characters were interesting to me. The writing is nice and I liked some of the Blake quotes but I'm sure I won't remember this book a year from now.
Neither the plot nor the characters were interesting to me. The writing is nice and I liked some of the Blake quotes but I'm sure I won't remember this book a year from now.
While I was intrigued by this novel from the very beginning, I ultimately felt that it took me rather too long to get into what was really going on in Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead. I should probably have reread the synopsis before starting the book so I didn't pick up on the earliest clues until they were revealed very late on. Instead I went into the story as if it were more slice-of-life fiction, exploring this remote Polish hamlet alongside Mrs Duszejko in her regular round as caretaker for the majority of the houses left unoccupied through the bitter winter. I loved Olga Tokarczuk's depictions of this rural environment with its deep forest and the perpetually impassable roads.
Mrs Duszejko (I shan't call her Janina!) is a wonderful character with whom I could strongly sympathise and empathise. Her idiosyncratic capitalising of certain proper nouns …
While I was intrigued by this novel from the very beginning, I ultimately felt that it took me rather too long to get into what was really going on in Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead. I should probably have reread the synopsis before starting the book so I didn't pick up on the earliest clues until they were revealed very late on. Instead I went into the story as if it were more slice-of-life fiction, exploring this remote Polish hamlet alongside Mrs Duszejko in her regular round as caretaker for the majority of the houses left unoccupied through the bitter winter. I loved Olga Tokarczuk's depictions of this rural environment with its deep forest and the perpetually impassable roads.
Mrs Duszejko (I shan't call her Janina!) is a wonderful character with whom I could strongly sympathise and empathise. Her idiosyncratic capitalising of certain proper nouns gave me insights into her priorities and beliefs. I learnt a lot about astrology too. What was most interesting to me though was Mrs Duszejko's awareness of how others viewed her, particularly authority figures for whom she would never be more than a batty old woman, and how she manipulated this perception. Her curiosity about the natural world around her appealed to me as, of course, did her stand against the flagrant disregard for Animals lives shown by the hunters. As Mrs Duszejko herself tells us, ‘Its Animals show the truth about a country,’ I said. ‘Its attitude towards Animals. If people behave brutally towards Animals, no form of democracy is ever going help them, in fact nothing will at all.’
I loved how accurately Mrs Duszejko nick-named her neighbours too. There's a great moment where she lets one of these private nick-names slip and the person she's talking to immediately recognises who she means!
As a murder mystery, I felt that Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead differed memorably from the genre standards which I often find too formulaic. This novel also has a lot to say about our misjudged social norms, most obviously in the area of animal rights but also with other sharp observations such as, 'Newspapers rely on keeping us in a constant state of anxiety, on diverting our emotions away from the things that really matter to us. Why should I yield to their power and let them tell me what to think?' I very much enjoyed reading Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead and would certainly try more of Olga Tokarczuk's work in the future.
Quirky characters, led by the quirky narrator. Charming, thought-provoking, clever, and elegantly written, even in translation. Highly recommended!
